Variety: The Acrostic

VARIETY PUZZLE — This was a tough one for me, but I was able to crack Emily Cox’s and Henry Rathvon’s acrostic with a few gimmes and a lot of persistence.

MARCIA BARTUSIAK’s “BLACK HOLE: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved” (Yale University Press, 2015) is a book about the contentious history of the idea of black holes and the heated debates about the supposedly illogical idea that an object in space could be so dense that nothing — even light — could escape.

Pushing into today’s acrostic felt a bit like that, although I enjoyed the fight. My gimmes today were INCISIVE, APPLESEED, KEESHOND and HARPOON, and I had to work hard for the rest of it. I had POWDERED for entry H before ATOMIZED.

By then, I had enough to start toggling between the clues and the grid, and that, as they say, is when the light went on. I couldn’t remember the crime associated with the song “Alice’s Restaurant” (shame on me; it’s LITTERING), but I was able to chip away at it. Next, I was able to get RATTLE, LIFE BUOY, OBSTACLE and ECOLOGY. That gave me the rest of the puzzle, and I loved the phrase “ZERO VOLUME AND INFINITE DENSITY.” What an intriguing concept.